October 9, 1998 transcript # 254-5
Subject(s): hurricanes
Title: THE DEADLIEST HURRICANE

One of the biggest ironies of Atlantic hurricanes is that they so often strike the placid islands of the Caribbean, where visitors go to find a bit of tropical paradise. But these heavenly islands more resembled hell over 200 years ago. Hi, this is Dave Thurlow for The Weather Notebook.

On the night of October 10, 1780, 218 years ago tomorrow, the Atlantic’s most deadly hurricane on record struck the Leeward and Windward Islands. In one awful night, more than 20,000 people died as a result of flooding and winds from the hurricane. Now, of course, in 1780, satellites weren’t around to track such storms, but we can deduce a surprising amount from ship reports and historical records of the time. The hurricane started as a classic Cape Verdean storm, moving off of the African coast and heading westward toward the Americas. Now moving very slowly west, the storm had as long as ten days to gather steam before it reached the British colony of Barbados.

This island had not seen a major hurricane for over a century, so many residents had become complacent. Those who took shelter in the British government house watched its three-foot-thick stone walls disintegrate in the storm. Afterward, one of the British residents, Sir George Rodney—wrote in his diary: "Had I not been an eyewitness, nothing could have induced me to have believed it. More than six thousand persons perished, and all the habitations are entirely ruined." The storm went on to kill thousands more in St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, and in St. Vincent (which is now Jamaica), where every building was blown down. The storm then curved back northward, passing just east of Puerto Rico and eventually Bermuda. If there had been a hurricane rating scale back in 1780, this one surely would have been one to top the charts.

Thanks today to contributing writer Bob Henson. Our show is underwritten by Subaru, with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.

Information on how to find historical data on tropical cyclones.